In food processing industries, traceability is an important aspect, especially since BSE was diagnosed in Europe. Even though focus mainly has been on meat products, the need for traceability of food products in general is increasing.
Typically, food products are processed, batched and packed in production lines wherein process equipment and workers are placed along conveyer lines. Often, and in particular in meat processing lines, large items, e.g. whole animals or large parts of animals are brought into one end of the process line from which end the items move towards an opposite end while they are sliced into various cuts, trimmed and optionally processed further before the sub-items end in food products, e.g. in a precooked meal or in packages with slices of meat. With regards to contamination and bacterial control, it is desirable to keep items of different origination completely separated. Separation, inevitably, implies time consuming, and costly logistic problems as well as increased loss when residual food items are too small to be used in the final product. It is therefore normal to mix items of various originations during food processing.
In existing food processing systems, food products can normally be traced back to a certain production date or period. The traceability primarily relies on batching of production series into food batches, wherein one food batch could represent production of a certain food product within a certain time frame. The food products are normally grouped into batches under consideration of required processes so that a batch e.g. requires trimming and cutting according to certain quality standards or the food products may be grouped based on their final destination, e.g. one batch of food items are to be shipped to a specific country. Due to the relatively rough grouping of the food products into batches, it happens that large amounts of finished products must be called back for destruction, e.g. due to contamination caused by items of one single origination, e.g. one animal carrying BSE, or due to contamination of a single production facility, e.g. contamination of a single circular saw out of many.
Manual registration of entering food items and labelling of the items as they pass through various processes do not solve the problem completely. Not least due to the repeated moving around with tags and the limited abilities of fastening tags to food items, e.g. under wet or humid conditions, and not least when items of various originations are combined in food products, the origination appearing on a label can be vitiated by errors and due to the degree of uncertainty combined with the seriousness involved in distribution of infected and possible injurious food products, it frequently happens that food producing industries dispose large quantities of food.